She had to stop. The black spaces were spreading over the whole picture. She stood and rubbed the sweat out of her eyes. She was breathing again, but it seemed to have no oxygen content. Her face and her neck and back were drenched. By now Mr. Henry might be just short of halfway across and losing momentum. His strokes would cease to move him forward and between each stroke he would drift downstream. He was trying to correct this by angling his body more and more against the current. He was pulling his head too far out to breathe. The stroke had a panicky look to it. He would float downstream and then crawl back, float and crawl, float and crawl. Every time he would lose a little more ground.
They should have strung the rope. Irini had said they should have done this, said it back on the Fourth of July. And then never followed through. Henry would surface one last time, his eyes flickering white and rolling like a frightened horse’s.
By now he was so far out; it was the distance between centerfield and home and then considerably more. If she were there, she could have thrown him the rope. It would have been the throw of her life. Walter couldn’t do it. Holcrow couldn’t do it. No one else in Magrit, no one but Irini Doyle, the human grenade launcher, could make this throw.
Irini had begun to run again. She made it to the mill parking lot. She saw Walter’s car, an inert lump shaped like a large toaster, in the mill drive. She started the climb. Somewhere above her Henry was floating, spinning in the current, flailing, flying. His legs were too heavy to kick now. His own legs were sinking him. Walter was trying to reach him.
She ran through the cold air in back of the falls, over the dim shelf of the rock. It cooled the sweat on her face.
Then there was a moment when she thought there was something in the water. In her peripheral vision she saw something large and colorful plummet over the falls. Irini screamed, but no one would hear it, not with the din of the water. She ran the rest of the way through, came out, and climbed back out into the heat to where she could look down.
She was still dizzy. Her eyes stung and wouldn’t work. There was nothing in the pool beneath her. Nothing moving downstream. She wasted valuable moments, looking, waiting for something to surface, trying to focus, praying as earnestly and naturally as if she believed in prayer. Maybe prayer wasn’t a matter of belief after all. Maybe it was instinct.
Then she raised her eyes to the falls themselves. There, hovering inside the water, she could just make out the liquid figure of a woman. She wore an apron tied in the back with a bow, like Maggie, but was otherwise naked. Her breasts, behind the striped bib, were large and maternal. She gazed upward, her arms curved out beyond her breasts, the way you would catch a large ball, the way you would hold a small child. She wavered there in the water, all motherly anticipation.
It calmed Irini down, even as it frightened her. Irini was not too late, not yet anyway, because there Maggie was, still waiting for her son to come to her. Expecting him. It was a race now, between Irini and Maggie Collins, herself.
Irini ran on. She made the top of the falls at last. She stood, panting, up by Nedd’s tower, dizzy from sweat and fright.
There was no more need to hurry. Henry lay in the cattails of the bank, coughing up water. Walter lay beside Henry, shivering uncontrollably. His blond hair was dark with water. He was making an awful face. Holcrow was wet as well. All three men were in their underwear.
“What happened?” Irini called. Her relief was vivid. It brightened the colors of the scene and sharpened the edges. She could see the little teeth on the leaves on the trees above Henry’s head. Someone else had saved him. She was embarrassed to feel just a touch of disappointment. She put it quickly aside.
“He didn’t make it,” Holcrow told her. “Walter paced him and then had to pull him out. I think he nearly sank Walter. I had to go in, too. Scared us all.”
Irini walked down the bank. Henry patted Walter’s arm and coughed. “It’s all right,” Henry said when he could speak again. He was remarkably chipper. His voice bounced from word to word. “I can hear again. Isn’t that the most remarkable thing?” He cupped a hand beneath one large ear, tapping the water out. The water filled his palm, spilled over the sides. “I’m perfectly all right, Walter. Stop shaking, boy. I’m perfect. Say something to me.”
Walter raised his ghastly eyes and looked at his grandfather. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Heard it. Heard every bit of it. I’m wonderful,” Henry insisted. All the little hairs stood out on his pale, skinny chest. “Don’t you see?” He coughed again. “The thing is, I haven’t eaten a bowl of Sweetwheats since the Fourth of July. You didn’t know that. But this is a very gratifying result. Nothing proven yet, of course, we’ll have to do more tests. But this is a gratifyingly suggestive beginning. Help me up.”
He held out his hands to Walter. Walter raised him. The two men stood together for a moment, holding each other tightly and it was Henry who provided the support. “There are birds in the trees!” he shouted, from behind Walter’s shoulder, so loudly that the birdsong he was hearing stopped suddenly and then started again.
They stayed at Upper Magrit for some little time and then they went back to the party. The men had dressed, with Irini averting her eyes, as if she hadn’t already seen them all. She could just as well have looked. There was nothing very thrilling about men in their underwear. She hoped they didn’t think otherwise.
They walked single file behind the falls without incident. Irini was careful to be in the middle. She couldn’t help but feel that the air was extra chilled. “It’s deafening in here,” Henry shouted happily, and it was. Someone could come right up behind you with a serrated knife and you would never hear a thing.
They got into Walter’s car. Back at Collins House Ruby had not yet been found, but Horace and Mike Barr had exchanged blows. No permanent damage had been done unless you counted Mike Barr asking Fanny to marry him right in front of everyone and her saying yes. Unless Irini was much mistaken, neither of them looked very happy about it. Fanny’s large Atomic Pin spat sparks from her shoulder.
Horace had a split lip and a mess of female sympathy about him. “You missed everything,” Tracy told Irini coldly. She looked from Irini to Holcrow. “So did you. Where have you been?” she asked and he bent over to tell her.
It was a secret, he said. Until Mrs. Ada was informed. She must come in very close to hear. Tracy was softening before Irini’s eyes.
When Ada was included, she did not take the news well. In deference to Walter’s feelings, the story Henry told was stripped of all drama. It was more of a parable; its focal point was the moment Henry could hear again. Even abstracted this way, it was enough to make Ada’s eyes pop out like a freshly caught fish.
“Why don’t you just leave Upper Magrit alone?” Claire asked when Henry had finished. She was flushed and tearful. Loving Mr. Henry as she did, and being Upper Magrit as she was, put her so often in an uncomfortable place. Now she was clustered with the Upper Magrit faction. They whispered together.
“That’s it,” said Ada. “That is absolutely it. We will be draining Upper Magrit this winter. We’ll raise it from the dead. We’ll put everything back the way it was.”
“Except the Nadeaus,” said Claire as if they were a family she’d actually met, people she actually missed.
“What’s Upper Magrit?” asked Horace.
“A memory,” said Sissy. The Upper Magrit faction whirled to look at her and then away again.
“I don’t think that’s possible, my love.” Henry’s voice was mild. “You can’t undo dynamite. You can’t unring a bell, you can’t implode an explosion. Anyway, I’ll need to swim it again after Sweetwheats have been restored to my diet. Today’s results will mean nothing without that.”
“Until Upper Magrit is raised, I will continue to fast. There will be no Sweetwheats in my diet. Nor anything else.” Ada turned, baring a white band of midriff briefly, and went upstairs. The party, it seemed, was over.
On the way home, Irini told her father about seeing Maggie Collins in the water of the falls. Her father took some time responding. He didn’t like it. Irini knew him. He was trying to find some way back to the point in his life before he had heard this.
“It seems more like something I would see,” he said first. “The things I’ve seen after a good night at Bumps!” He spent a moment lost in memory.
“Maybe it was dust that you saw. Dust does some strange things. Makes sunsets, makes clouds. The sky wouldn’t be blue without dust. You think of that next time you’re dusting.
“Of course, you’d just run all that way,” he tried next. “On such a hot day. On an empty stomach. I’m sure you were seriously dehydrated. Dangerously dehydrated. These things are bound to happen.”
He twisted the steering wheel, putting them safely back on Brief Street. Since the bus accident, Irini had felt a little differently about Brief Street. It was home. It was where she belonged. The car slipped beneath the shadows of the trees like a fish through the weeds. Her father shook his lean and feral face. “Fistfights, and engagements, and missing persons, and ghosts.”
Tweed came off the porch to meet them. Her toenails scraped the paint of the door before they’d even come to a stop. Irini opened the door and Tweed put her head in Irini’s lap. She looked up at Irini. She was the best dog in the whole world.
“You’ve got to expect these sorts of things will happen when you give a party and you don’t serve drinks,” Irini’s father said.
37
The last thing the Sweethearts did together as a team was to lower the big chandelier at Collins House before the party. They had played their last game and the rest had to be can celed. Ruby couldn’t be found. Cindy’s arm might take six weeks to heal; the season would be over. The bus had limped home to Magrit but needed expensive repairs, many of them cosmetic. This didn’t mean they weren’t necessary. What kind of an advertisement for Sweetwheats would it be, Claire pointed out, if the Sweethearts arrived in a rusted, dented bus?
And now that Fanny was engaged, she had less enthusiasm for her chaperoning duties. “It’s not as much fun as it was. I’m turning my attentions to the other kind of diamond,” she said. Helen, too, had become engaged soon after Fanny.
Also there were Maggie’s tirades. Hard to keep that old team feeling when the person throwing you the ball and pretending to be so nice and ordinary was really no such thing.
At first, because Irini didn’t know who was responsible, she had tried to suspect no one. Now she suspected them all. And they all had to suspect her—in fact, they suspected her strongly, all but one of them anyway. She didn’t have a friendship untouched by Maggie’s outbursts.
That was the cruelest part, not knowing who. Mike Barr picked up on the tension. “Girls don’t really have team spirit,” he said. “That’s why they’re not great athletes. They’re not really team players.”
“As if we don’t cook together every day of our lives,” Fanny told the girls in the Kitchen. She was taking exception to everything Mike said these days. She was planning her wedding.
The yellow greens of spring had become the gray greens of late summer. Summers passed so quickly in Magrit, and there was a sense of more things coming to an end than just the season. It was horrid. “There’ll be next year,” Arlys told Irini, who was strangely tearful.
She retired to her bedroom, where she progressed from tears to great gulping sobs, crying in a way she hadn’t cried since she was twelve. And it was all for baseball. There wouldn’t be a next year, and Irini knew it. She would never get over her batting slump; it would be permanent. Mr. Henry was already off searching for Chi Chi, the bowling ape, and once he found her he would have no more need for the baseball-playing girls.
Back in Magrit, one early evening shortly after the party, when Irini should have been at practice, except there was no more practice, ever, Irini’s father knocked on her bedroom door.
“Get your mitt,” he told her. “My own chick. My little chickadee. Let’s go out back for some pop-ups.” It was almost dark, late to be beginning a game. He must have something that just couldn’t wait.
They often played catch, but they hadn’t played pop-ups for years. Irini had a dreadful, dizzy feeling. She remembered being twelve again, the great shock sex had been to her. First her period and then sex, all casually conveyed to her while the ball was high in the air. But the games had gotten fewer and fewer and she had let herself imagine she pretty much knew it all.
Her father had clearly fortified himself with drink for this occasion. Was it possible there was something else now, something worse than sex, some new surprise so utterly appalling she had never had a clue? Something that couldn’t even be hinted at until she was at least nineteen?
“Move in,” her father said. “I’m going to throw them really high.” The ball disappeared into the branches of the apple tree and came back down with several apples. It was a trick throw. Still, Irini had great powers of concentration; Irini caught it and an apple as well. “How would you like to go to college?” her father asked. “Get a teaching credential or something. You’re a smart girl. You don’t want to stay in Magrit your whole life, do you? It’s not what I want for you.”
“How are we going to pay for that?” Irini asked.
“I thought we could sell the house,” her father said. “You’d have to get a place anyway, of course, on campus. Don’t move to the right. Catch it across your body.”
“Throw me a really high one. Where will you live?”
“There’s a couple of rooms above Bumps. The ones Holcrow’s been in. He’s got to move on eventually and I think they could make quite a comfortable apartment.”
“You’re going to live above the bar? I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Have the Baldishes agreed to this?”
“Yes. Yes, they have.”
“I don’t like to think of you living by yourself above a bar.”
“Mmm-hmm. It’s still Magrit, Irini. You conjure up a picture of the Bowery. Don’t move like that. Practice catching it across your body.”
“Why? Why should I practice? When am I ever going to play baseball again?”
“Don’t be sad, Irini. It’s the one thing in the world I can’t bear. Think about going to college. All the things you’ll learn. All the people you’ll meet. I really think it’s the right move for us now.”
“Anyway, we’d have two rents then. Would we really be any better off?”
“Actually I wouldn’t be paying rent.”
“The Baldishes are letting you live above Bumps for free?”
“Yep. Give me a nice high one back. That’s my girl.”
“And who would buy our house? People aren’t streaming into Magrit.”
“I rather think Helen might. Her and her beau. Mr. Henry has offered him a job in sales. He’ll qualify for a V.A. loan plus his disability. I really think we could do it.”
“Have you talked to Helen about this already?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I just don’t think I can let you do this. It’s so awfully sweet of you, Dad, but I can’t accept. The house is all we have. And you’ll be lonely all by yourself. What if you got sick and I had a job in some other town and I couldn’t come and take care of you?”
“I guess my wife would have to take care of me. Oh, unlucky. You took your eye off the ball.” The game came to a stop. Her father’s voice was casual, but his face was as white as an egg. “The thing is. The thing is, my love. My own Irini. My only, darlingest child.” Irini’s father began to play catch with himself. Little tiny pop-ups, like juggling. He was just drunk enough to make it exciting. “I rather thought of asking Norma to marry me. Only if it’s all right with you.”
Norma Baldish. Norma Baldish! “Have you asked her already?”
“I may have hinted at it.”
“Did she hint at her answer?”
“She said yes.”
“So that stuff about it being all right wi
th me, that’s just for form. Really I can’t do a thing about it. You know how I hate it when people ask me for my advice, but it’s really already done.”
“Irini, you’re the love of my life. If you say no, then I’ll instantly become the sort of despicable heel who makes promises to a woman and then breaks them.” He caught the ball and looked at her. In some lights, from some angles, he was a handsome man. His face was thin and toothy and hairy, but it was quite a masculine look. He wore it well, except when drunkenness slackened the whole facade—except for that eighty percent of the time.
He was much better-looking than Norma Baldish. Of course, he was considerably older. Much, much older. Horribly older. Norma was not all that much older than Irini. Irini hated this part.
“Do you love her?”
“The woman can fix a car, snowplow a street, pump a septic tank, bring a deer down with a single shot, and make a martini so dry it’ll suck your heart right out through your throat. Of course I love her. Good golly, Irini. Who wouldn’t? I’m the luckiest man in the world.”
Norma Baldish was also a primary suspect in the Maggie Collins case. A suspect with no possible motivations, so if she was responsible for Maggie’s tantrums, then she was probably mad as a hare. A mad, capable, sharp-shooting hare.
“Of course, you’re surprised,” her father said. “I know, I know. I told you once that true love was the worst thing that could happen to a man. When it hits you, I said, you go home and have a few stiff drinks. Have more than a few. In the morning, when you wake and you feel that sick, slugged-in-the-stomach feeling, at least there’ll be some confusion as to the cause. I remember saying that.”
He had never said this to Irini in her whole life. Irini held out her mitt, so that he threw her the ball. His eyes were on her. They were standing close enough together that she could see his inky, pleading pupils. “I’m so happy, my love.”
She forced herself to smile at him. “Then that’s all right,” she said. “Then that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
The Sweetheart Season Page 32
